A small Belgian company called I.R.I.S. makes a superb pen-
sized hand scanner with the best OCR software I've ever seen.
It scans line-by-line at over 100 characters/second and pastes
the text directly and almost instantly into any active application
that can accept text. The pen is simple and foolproof, drawing
power from the keyboard or an external keyboard/mouse port
via adaptors. It also has a battery pack good for one hour and
can take a 6-volt 500mA external power supply. More
importantly, the OCR software comes with all European
languages, including Modern Greek. I've used it with MG as
well as Russian, German and English this summer to scan
excerpts from books and articles. Pack your laptop to the
library, set up on a vacant desk with an outlet and scan while
reading. The IRISpen is much faster than making notes by
hand or typing, and can also scan images into the clipboard for
pasting. It even scans tables of numbers into spreadsheet
tables.

All the character fonts come with a default set of characters
and additional symbols that can be activated for OCR. The
Greek font works perfectly, but can only recognize those
diacritics common in MG.

For spelling, one needs the same company's flatbed scanner
software, called Readiris, now in version 3.9. It supports 26
European languages, including MG. Each language has a
lexicon of 100,000 thousand words.

The pen and software sell for $249. Both Windows and
Macintosh software are included. For further technical specs
see their web page at